


you complete me

by badwltch



Category: Queen of the Damned (2002), Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Blood Drinking, Fluff and Angst, Horror, M/M, Slightly Erotic Blood Drinking, angst with a semi-happy ending, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-25 23:51:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17131043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwltch/pseuds/badwltch
Summary: (After the events of QotD) Armand's previous lives begin to haunt him as he realizes he might once again lose someone he loves. Angst, fluff, and heartache ensue.





	1. the thing i hate

**Author's Note:**

> This is a secret santa gift for 42sunberries. I hope it’s to your liking :)

“I don’t want you to leave.” My voice eased out sincerely, deeply. I was angry and yet my voice was calm compared to its origin. It had been a month after the events of Lestat’s second memoir, The Queen of the Damned. These days we argued almost every night; I had foreseen this tragedy when I had tasted his still-human blood for the last time on the plane. He would forever despise me for giving him life, for saving him from death’s dark unknowing grasp. Life would never ask again for his hand.

“You have no bounds to what you can control, but there is always a respectable limit, Armand.” He moved towards the door, twisting the metal knob, cool to the touch.

I couldn’t respond. My heart beat out of control, my head was spinning in clouds where a storm was brewing.

“I gave you a chance. And you crushed it.” his hand was on the doorway already. Violet eyes full of sorrow masked by anger. Slam. His exit reverberated through the floor. I could feel the tremors up my spine and into the rhythm of my aching beating heart.

I swallowed a lump. The world seemed to narrow around me, to darken in the visceral edges of my eyes, and all I could focus on was the door and the last faint footsteps before he left the island. My heart dropped. I had made too many grievous mistakes, and I too easily dismissed myself as a dark angel surrounded by an dark gray clouds heavy with rain. I locked that angel inside.

I gently wiped the blood off of my bottom eyelid with my fingertips, and held my hand in front of me, staring at the liquid as it seeped into the creases and the lines that made up my fingerprints.

An unexpected knock on the door. The air was terribly still, and the silence deafening. My hand froze as I glanced up from my dissociative wandering.

Pang on the glass window. Even my vampire eyes did not catch a glimpse of a shadow, or a fleeting movement of any preternatural being. With my mind, I searched and implored the others on the island for an explanation. And though I could not reach Daniel, they told me that he had already left the island. I felt no malevolence or trickery within their minds.

Without so much as a sound, I padded across the room to the door and cautiously opened it, peeking out at first through a small crack. I looked down, perplexed at this mystery. Upon opening the door fully, I saw a box graced with intricate carvings and gracefully mastered metalwork.

I fearfully bowed on my knees to pry open the box with my long fingers.

Ashes? I dipped my fingers in the pile, and let them slide off of my marble hands.

The image was gone. I stood again at the door, unopened. No remnants of the ashes were on my hands, or on my clothes. Behind the door was nothing; all was normal, as normal could be.

Louis was in New Orleans at the present, but I had to see him. Who else could I speak to about this?

 

Louis laid his head back against the back of the tombstone. I twisted my head to look at his profile: his long nose, his sharp jaw, the moon’s light reflecting off his mid-neck length black strands. He held one knee against his chest with that sad sweater.

“So,” I began, “how are things?” Who knew vampires still felt obligated to have small talk? (I have never been proficient in small talk, in all honestly.)

“Everything’s just as it always has been.”

I creased my brow, my confusion and concern evident in the same expression. I longed to touch his hand, his face, or any part of him, really.

Louis tilted his head. “You look worried,” he commented.

I sighed. It would do no good to tell him about the box, about the coven’s home, about Daniel. And yet I wanted to, I wanted to speak my unrest, to make my defective thoughts real. I wanted to know that I wasn’t merely imagining these truths. I needed it to be real, tangible, and something I could fix.

I hesitated before replying, considering carefully my confession. I held my breath and shifted my eyes away anxiously. “Not always the best. But that’s life. Or purgatory, more like,” I thought, “I’ll get through it just like I have before.”

He studied my expression. “Do you want to talk about it?” Difficult words that came easily and softly from his lips.

“I don’t know.”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”

“That’s strong, especially coming from you.”

“I know.”

“And what is Lestat up to these days?”

“You’re trying to change the conversation again. Don’t.” He spoke gently, softly, and I so desired all at once to confess everything. But he didn’t deserve my agony as well. He reached out a hand but I pushed it away.

I shriveled up. I wanted him to push me away, to validate my mistakes. Even after all these years, I wanted, no -- needed -- to confirm that our century spent together meant nothing compared to the bond between fledgling and maker. Errors of years past have continued to pester and haunt me. Does it ever get easier? It would be easier to say if I didn’t have to say it out loud.

“Did you mean for me to hear that?”

“Hear what?” I asked, oblivious, knowing quite well that I did.

Louis just smiled, while I frowned sorrowfully, guiltily, pleadingly.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up; a tingling sensation traveled down my spine. My mind and my senses found nothing out of the ordinary, and yet something had intensely unsettled me.

It was the same premonition I experienced when I saw the ashes a foot outside of his bedroom door.

Was this haunting my own imagination? A ghost of my own creation, a making of my own demise? How could I wash away the tormenting ache?

A frown covered Louis’ visage. “What’s frightening you?” he asked me, like the calm waves of the ocean on a silent night.

“Do you ever see ghosts?” I stammered, prompted by fear and a yielding desire to hear the words I needed from somebody else that would understand.

Dread crept up behind me, the cold from the headstone seeped through my denim jacket. I panicked and feared his response.

“Sometimes,” he said, curiously; and allayed my worried mind.

Peace engulfed us. I wondered how to respond, but he required nothing of me. True friendship allowed that sort of comfort.

“Armand,” he said to me, “you don’t belong to any age. What is done is done.”

He wanted violence. He wanted blood. Every cell in his body screamed for more. It was an insatiable thirst, a hunger that plagued him like a chronic disease. He was ashamed of his first innocent kill; but the smell, so overpowering, so terribly delicious, won his body and his soul over. He must give in to the Dark Gift, and respect its desire for blood.

The red-tinted clouds above reflected his inner-self, a mirror of bloodthirsty desire. The clouds, mostly infused by the effervescent lights, waved across the stars that marked the passage of time.

He drifted through the crowd of people, quickly slipping from here to there like a shadow; he was a demon prowling the night. He was searching for his prey, for the evildoer; his last bit of patience and strong will was the only barrier to taking whomever he chose.

His thirst was insurmountable; he was itching from the inside out. The crowd only increased his ravenous appetite, every drop of salty sweat invited him, every small cut or wound that leaked blood tortured him and begged him to take it all by force.

First was a trafficker out for victims of his own; he hated the taste of evil but relished in the physical quality of the rich, nutritious blood. His second sacrifice to the Blood would be the innocent bystander who wished that death would come; was it not a mercy rather than a murder? The bodies he left to rot in the dumpster and the bathroom of the club.

And the last victim for the night would be doubly satisfying. Daniel veered off into the alleyway, knowing a man behind him with grim intentions was following him step by step into the murky shadows. He may have had a knife or two, and his fists, but those were puny objects compared to the strength Daniel carried. The darkness was his territory.

The notions he gathered from the boy were extremely malevolent and deadly in nature. “I know what you think about me,” he said slyly with a devilish demeanor. The boy smugly smiled, reaching for his weapons of choice.

“Tell me what I am. Tell me why.” Daniel loomed over the increasingly pathetically smaller man. Daniel had nothing to fear any longer; no mortal could even make a dent on his stone-like skin.

The boy spit on Daniel’s shoes, edging closer as he did so. “You’re disgusting.”

“You are so enticing.”

The boy backed off in a horrified manner; the terrorizing realization of his doom spread over his bitter face. He stumbled backwards over the rough surface of the cracked asphalt, nearly falling on the palms of his hands.

Daniel grabbed him quickly, one hand on the back of his head and the other roughly on his shoulder. The boy let out a gasp, wiggling to escape like the pathetic meat-sack that he was. Daniel could not think of anything more cruel, but the boy deserved nothing less than death for the deaths and the pain that he had caused, all in the name of hatred. He paused, self-aware once again, before he gave in and sank his little teeth into the easily-punctured skin of the impish creature. The pull was too much to refuse, the pull of the blood, the pull of revenge. I will not become the thing I hate. And yet, the fervor of the moment overtook him, and his appetite for retribution was satiated.

The fleshy, limp corpse of the boy hung like a dirty rag doll from Daniel’s hand as he looked up at me. The streetlamps behind him cast his body as a domineering silhouette, his double shadow nearly reaching the pointed edge of my black boots. Daniel’s eyes glinted like a wild animal, prowling in the night for its doomed prey. “If he’s not enough, then have me.” My voice wavered, cracking as I so boldly asked him to forgive me.

He carelessly dropped the rag doll on the hard ground, his eyes hungry and bloodshot with the lust that permeated his veins. His hair stuck to his forehead, damp with the humidity of the night and the blood from either his victim or himself.

So much pain in one night. So much death, even if deserved, I thought. For one moment, a heavy touch of pain pierced my insides, my demeanor distraught before I was able to push it away behind locked doors like I usually did. I had to, if I were to continue living.

And what does it mean to live when you are already dead?

“Daniel.” Something bitter was on my tongue. I should not act so rashly. But I so sorely needed to feel that high again, to feel close to someone, to feel love and companionship, even if it wasn’t true. My bearing was stiff and rigid and cold, but I longed to melt into the warmth of Daniel’s blood and hunt. I wanted to embrace Daniel again, to know his thoughts, his lust, his love, his thirst. He was so young for a vampire, and his thirst still at times overtook him, sometimes nearly strangling him. I knew, and I felt, and I remembered.

Daniel, a head taller than me, slowly caressed his hands around my neck, pressing my hard, cold skin with his fingers, testing the skin over my artery for an ample, supple spot. Armand tensed the closer Daniel’s face breathed on his face and neck.

I swallowed a lump down my throat. “No, not like this.” I reached around Daniel’s waist stiffly, afraid but desiring. He looked up at him, his eyes doleful yet passionate.

“I know.” He spoke not with the ferocity of a creature of the night, but an animal with empathy.

“Your blood sings to me against my better judgement.”

“Can you taste it already?”

“I can taste death, and death only,” I confessed. “I am a bringer of death, so why should I have life?”

Daniel bent Armand’s neck to the side and leaned down to taste. I froze.

“You’re more human than you realize.” Daniel whispered by my ear.

There’s nothing better than feeling human. To feel humility, passion, excitement, sorrow -- the pain is better than the apathy to which I have so long committed myself. 

I put up my hand between us, between my exposed neck and his lust for richer blood.

“Stop. I can’t do this like this. We can’t. I don’t want us to be like this.”

Daniel’s eyes still shone dully with the Blood’s influence. He appeared disappointed. He craved the taste, he craved the dark blood that pulsed through my every sinew, every vein, every cell.

“Daniel,” I said firmly, the words rolling off my tongue with sincere precision.

“I can’t stand to be around you, and yet I still want you. Even more so than I did when I was still human.” The barbarity had all but disappeared.

I wrapped my arm around his waist, drawing him to me as I kissed him on his neck, then his lips. I begrudgingly allowed him to pick me up to kiss me again, this time deeply. 

He bit my tongue, dragging me deeper and deeper into sentient pleasure. I never want this to end, I thought. He pulled back my hair after setting me down, and moved his silken lips across my neck. I shivered against him as he drew blood again, lustfully and possessively. I rolled my eyes back before coming to, blinking several times. I felt relieved.

I breathed hard, relaxing against his broad chest, enfolded in his arms.

“I long to go back home,” I said forlornly.

“And where is home?” We looked at each other.

“Wherever you are,” I smiled sadly. “Come back to Night Island with me.” His demeanor changed sour. “Even if for only one more night,” I added. His violet eyes softened at my tone.


	2. careful detachment / c'est fais

 

 

_I don’t remember how I got here. Did I carry myself here? Are these my feet, the feet and legs that walked here, filled with electricity and nerves like a machine?_   
_Daniel was not with me. And I saw no light, no streetlamp on the dirty, overgrown sidewalk that went away from the house. I reached out with my mind and was met with silence, and yet I felt as if hidden eyes were watching me in the dark, whispering to each other about this old man in a young man’s body, about the living dead man, about the man who had murdered thousands of lives in order to feed his own existence and greed._

_My own fictitious imagination attacked me relentlessly -- or at least I thought it to be from my own. I couldn’t tell what was real, and what was my imagination._

_The waves crashed against the sandy shores and the rocky cliffs. It was so surreal -- a seemingly abandoned but still lit suburban neighborhood next to such a precarious edge._

_I walked into one house in particular that caught my attention. It was old, an antiquity of ages past. Iron gates surrounded the perimeter of the decrepit and neglected yard; vines climbed up to the shutters on the windows; some had broken the glass and infiltrated inside._

_One step across the threshold and on the wooden floorboards, and the world seemed to turn to mush around me. I shouldn’t be here, and yet against my intuition I knew I had to be here._

_Perhaps I was underwater. I felt like I was drowning; my were lungs desperate for the oxygen they didn’t even need. This was the border between life and death; it was the line our kind will walk for eternity._

_Fatigue dripped from my fingertips and down my legs. It amplified the drums within. Everything within me fought against the current as I struggled up the stairs and to the balcony, where I could be safe from the oncoming flood._

_The little girl was waiting for me outside the doors. I stepped over the broken glass, the prickly vines tore my pants and nicked blood from my legs. I wondered what the kraken plant that infested this house surmised of this dastardly vampire._

_Her translucent aura held out its hands, and in those petite palms was the box I had envisioned before. I inched my fingers under the sides and extracted it from her icy spirit. Had I seen her somewhere before?_

_I withdrew from her and passed through the border to the open, salty air that blew from the ocean. Within the box I glimpsed at all that I could have been, every path, every person, every choice that I had made or been forced to make. These ghosts no longer frightened me with their bellowing and bawling._

_I burnt their screams into ashes, and released them into the sea from the shores of the living._

The curtains gracing the window were still draped shut when I awoke, and Daniel slept to my left. A dark weight seemed to have lifted off my chest, and my breath flowed easier than before. The clothes we had worn the night before were in a pile in a chair in the corner of the room. I felt light, as one does after expending all of their energy, and all of their hurt.

I stood up in my briefs to pull the curtains back, to let the twilight infiltrate the room. Oh, how beautiful the night seemed then. The sky was clear, the moon shone bright, and the crash of the waves against the rocky shores were audible even from where I stood.

Daniel stirred behind me and I crawled back under the covers, stiffly laying on my back, my hair strewn loosely across the pillow. He curled up next to me to lay on my chest and muttered, “’morning.” I stifled a laugh. Maybe it had all been a nightmare, all of this. Maybe I hadn’t had made the mistake of driving Daniel to the brink of death, to have been forced by my hand to be brought into the blood. For a moment I had forgotten, and what a blissful moment it was. How could I have been so utterly foolish?

It was soon to be Christmas, and some decorations had already been put up outside. I thought of assembling a tree with Daniel here, but I wasn’t sure he would still be here for that.

Daniel, this won’t last forever, but I hope you know that I will love you for eternity.

**Author's Note:**

> I probably didn't edit this as much as I should have. :x  
> My main inspiration, and coincidentally where I derived the title of this story, comes from the Stabbing Westward Album _Darkest Days._ It's a pretty good album, and you should give it a listen if you have time.


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